God and Hillary Clinton (27 page)

Apparently, common ground had not been found. This was most certainly not what Mrs. Clinton had envisioned when she planned to reach out to disgruntled Catholics who rejected John Kerry two months earlier, and as she was quickly learning, appealing to Catholics would be much harder than she had imagined. Social justice alone was not enough, regardless of what advisers and friends on the religious left had told her.

While Hillary went on to make the speech, the extent of the furor that it created within the Catholic community prevented her from gaining any true traction on the issue. Still, she was trying to make inroads into unfamiliar territory, and these inroads would take work.
Some of these experiments would prove too unfriendly and too controversial to make a difference. Others would be met by friendly press and friendly moderates who felt that this change in language signaled a new side to the Democratic senator. Regardless of the outcome of these specific events, Hillary found herself with the luxury of time. Though she was widely suspected to be the Democratic Party's leading contender for 2008, the primaries themselves were still three years away. Until then, she had time to refine her strategy and cultivate relationships.

Right to Live and Die

Symbolic of Hillary's struggles to repackage herself as middle ground on issues of religion and morality was her reaction to the demise of the world's preeminent pro-life Catholic, Pope John Paul II, with whom the Clintons had butted heads during the presidential years, and another Catholic who was dominating headlines in the United States: Terri Schiavo.

A battle was raging between what the pope called the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death over whether to remove a feeding tube from Schiavo—her husband's wishes. Her parents insisted she was not brain-dead and that they be permitted to take care of her. Hillary, whether thinking of politics or maybe the death of her father a decade earlier, stayed out of the issue, leaving it to the Schiavo family, even as it came before Congress.
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A Florida judge, granting the request of Schiavo's husband, ordered that her feeding tube be removed, and that doctors permit her to be starved to death.

The underwhelming nature of Hilary's response to Schiavo left some of her liberal supporters fit to be tied. Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins wrote an op-ed titled, “I Will Not Support Hillary Clinton for President.”
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The reason, wrote Ivins, was Mrs. Clinton's “failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo.” Indeed, as the controversy heated up,
Hillary failed to take an open stance on the issue that rapidly became one of the country's most talked about debates. As religious, cultural, medical, and political groups from around the country weighed in with their support for either Schiavo's husband or her parents, Hillary kept to herself, evidently unwilling to tread into the political hot water that the discussion entailed.

In the end her silence proved shrewd; had she spoken in support of Schiavo's parents, activist groups on the left would have no doubt vilified her as a traitor. On the other hand, if she had sided with Schiavo's husband, she would have been opening herself up to criticism from the right-to-life movement that she had been arduously courting since Election Day the previous year. It was a precarious tightrope, and the only way to walk it was to remain silent.

Meanwhile, as Schiavo began to enter the point of no return around March 30, a dying, suffering John Paul II himself had a feeding tube inserted and clung to life, barely reaching the period that formally begins Divine Mercy Sunday, a feast day created when he canonized a little-known, uneducated Polish nun in 2000. He died on April 2, barely outliving Schiavo, and no doubt hoping to provide America and the world with a stark contrast and a reminder of the value of life.

On Sunday, April 3, just hours after the death of the pope, both Hillary and Bill jointly praised the man as a “beacon of light” for all people and a “force for democracy.” Bill said that he and his wife were “deeply saddened” by the passing. In a separate statement from her Senate office, Hillary praised the pontiff's “authority as a force for democracy, tolerance, and forgiveness,” commending his “unmatched intellect, his infinite heart,” and his “message of love and hope.”
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Mrs. Clinton was very careful with her words; her husband, however, was not. As the Clintons were aboard Air Force One, at the invitation of the current president, to fly to Rome to attend the pope's funeral, Bill was asked about the pontiff's legacy. Eager to talk about himself, he drew comparisons between the pope's legacy and his own,
telling reporters that John Paul II “may have a mixed legacy,” a comment often made about Clinton. This prompted the current president, George W. Bush, to counter that the pontiff was leaving a “clear legacy,” a “strong legacy of setting a clear moral tone.”

Bill's comments were a bit clumsy, and highly offensive to some, even though, when viewed in full, they were not that bad: “There will be debates about him,” explained Clinton. “But on balance, he was a man of God, he was a consistent person, he did what he thought was right. That's about all you can ask of anybody.”
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Basically, Clinton had spoken for millions of liberals who felt the same way.

Nonetheless, outraged conservatives launched straight to the moon: The pro-life Web site LifeSiteNews.com may have gone over the top when it concluded that Clinton, who, it noted, was “one of recent history's most ardent political advocates of abortion,” had “placed himself on equal footing with the Pope.” The words of Pastor Joseph Grant Swank Jr. of the New Hope evangelical church in Maine were blistering: “This rank sinner of the most alley cat genre plows into the Pope on the way to the Pope's funeral!”
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According to another detractor, columnist Michael J. Gaynor, Clinton was lucky that “a merciful God did not strike him dead on the spot” for the comparison.
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Hillary, as usual, had the better sense to avoid any self-comparisons, as did George W. Bush, who kept a low profile in Rome. “He recognized the significance of the moment,” said Bush spokesman Scott McClellan. “And the focus should rightly be on the Holy Father.” As McClellan made that statement, Bill Clinton had just finished an interview on the pope with
NBC Nightly News
anchor Brian Williams, watched by millions.
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Much can be said of the two deaths in Rome and Florida that week, particularly in regard to the Clintons' position on “life” issues like abortion and euthanasia. The deaths of Pope John Paul II and Terri Schiavo at that particular time, during that week, and the opposing ways in which they occurred, were viewed by many Christians as not
coincidental. Recall the pope's words directed at the crowd and the Clintons in Denver on August 12, 1993: He had said that the right to life and protection of the human person needed to be the “great cause” of the post–Cold War United States. It was this bridge between the end of Communism at the close of the twentieth century and the cause of life so prominent at the start of the twenty-first century that the pope's own death—in keeping with his words—now seemed to represent. With the death of Pope John Paul II, it seemed that the twentieth century had finally ended, a tad late, and the twenty-first century had, alas, only now begun.

Despite the new image that she was trying to cultivate, it seemed unlikely that Hillary agreed—if she did, she certainly did not say so. Fittingly, it was these very same life issues that continued to hound Mrs. Clinton in her bid to position herself as a moderate and a Christian Democrat.

On April 25, the pro-life Christian Defense Coalition fired off a smoking press release: In response to Hillary's olive branch in her speeches, the Christian Defense Coalition—hoping to spark a dialogue and find common ground with Hillary—maintained that it had tried throughout February, March, and early April to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Senator Clinton, who ultimately declined.

“We are profoundly disappointed that Senator Clinton has refused to sit down and dialogue with a broad coalition of voices within the pro-life community after suggesting she wanted to reach out to us,” said the Reverend Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the coalition. “It now seems that the statements Senator Clinton made, concerning finding common ground on abortion, were politically motivated and not sincere. These comments should now be viewed as an attempt to reinvent herself and appear less radical on the issue of abortion in light of the 2008 race for the White House.” Mahoney cautioned: “I think it is critical that the American public focus more on what Senator Clinton does concerning abortion, rather than her rhetoric, as we move closer to the presidential campaign season.”
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The coali
tion held a news conference on Tuesday, April 26, outside the Russell Office Building on Capitol Hill.

If she was actually looking to find “common ground” with elements within the pro-life movement, ignoring the Christian Defense Coalition was a wasted opportunity. While it is far-fetched to think that the two sides would have shared any specific policy goals about abortion procedures themselves, the mere act of sitting down at the table together might have had a lasting effect, as it would have backed up her words with actions. The two sides could have discussed a more benign subject, such as teen abstinence policy, as a way to begin a dialogue, much in the way that Hillary had with Mother Teresa a decade earlier. An act like that would have gone a long way to proving that there was significance simply in discussion and her willingness to put her religious values at the forefront of her policy. Unfortunately, the group's entreaties were met with silence.

Public Religion

While the Christian Defense Coalition was questioning Hillary's sincerity on certain values, Hillary tapped other ways to showcase her faith for religious voters. In April 2005, Hillary took her faith credentials in a different direction by cosponsoring the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. For this piece of legislation, she joined forces with conservative colleague Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) to write a bill that guaranteed the right to religious expression on the job without fear of recrimination. This meant, for example, that an Orthodox Jew who honors the Sabbath cannot be forced to work on the Sabbath against his or her will, or that a Christian can wear a crucifix, or that a Sikh can don a turban. Backers of the bill included a broad coalition of forty clerics representing nearly every major denomination.

Hillary's support of the legislation was not surprising given that she had long supported the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act,
signed by her husband for the purpose, in Bill's words, “to protect a reasonable range of religious expression in public areas like schools and workplaces.”
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In addition, Hillary had written on this point in
It Takes a Village
, agreeing with conservative Christians on the importance of religion in schools. Quoting her husband, her book noted that “nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones, or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door.” She also cited these words from Bill: “[R]eligion is too important in our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools.”
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The Workplace Religious Freedom Act, which any reasonable person would support, had opponents among Senator Clinton's staunchest allies: Planned Parenthood and the National Women's Law Center foresaw intolerable instances of “anti-choice” injustice, such as a situation where a pro-life nurse might request to not provide the “morning-after” pill to a rape victim, or a Catholic pharmacist might as a matter of conscience refuse to dispense birth control. For these pro-choice organizations, religious freedom should not be permitted to overrule the unshakable right to an abortion. In many ways, it was surprising that Hillary did not agree with them; perhaps she did, but overlooked how her legislation would conflict with abortion rights.

It was this narrow opposition from activist groups that might have explained why, as the
Village Voice
put it, “[Mrs.] Clinton's office has been notably quiet about her involvement” in the bill.
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The bill placed Senator Clinton in a conundrum, forcing her to choose between freedom of conscience and heresy in the church of abortion feminism.

Another Catholic Uproar

As Hillary struggled to connect her new language with new actions, the issue of abortion continued to hound her. Though she had proven
herself willing to incorporate her own concept of faith and morality into the discussion, the issue seemed to be further separating her from the religious “values voters” she had hoped to attract. In addition, the issue was not going away: The entire cycle with Canisius four months earlier was about to repeat itself, this time at another Catholic college.

Just days after Senator Clinton voted to nullify the “Mexico City Policy”—by which President Bush in 2001, by executive order, stopped U.S. funds from supporting overseas “population assistance” programs that promoted abortion—Marymount Manhattan College in New York City announced that Mrs. Clinton would be delivering its commencement address on May 20 and would also be receiving an honorary doctoral degree.
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Once again, Catholic groups were outraged and marshaled the troops.

Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, which establishes Newman Centers for Catholic students at colleges all over the country, said it would be a “scandal” for Marymount Manhattan to proceed. He made specific reference to Senator Clinton's vote against a ban on partial-birth abortion, her advocacy of embryonic stem cell research, and her declaration that contraception was “basic health care for women.” Further, Reilly noted that Marymount Manhattan's actions defied the “Catholics in Political Life” document approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—the same guidelines that the bishop of Buffalo had underscored during the Canisius fiasco.
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